The Hastings Center Report

Peer-reviewed publications on Questia are publications containing articles which were subject to evaluation for accuracy and substance by professional peers of the article's author(s).

The Hastings Center Report is a bimonthly magazine addressing ethical issues in medicine and the life sciences for an audience of physicians and other health care practitioners, attorneys and professionals in business and academia. Founded in Feb. of 1971, The Hastings Center publishes this magazine. Subjects for the Hastings Center Report are medicine and surgery. The Managing Editor is Joyce Griffin. Gregory E. Kaebnick is the Editor.

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Articles from Vol. 31, No. 3, May

Arizona's Cancer Clinical Trials Law: Flawed Process, Flawed Product

For many cancer patients, participation in a clinical trial is more attractive than receiving standard therapies, which may be limited in effectiveness. Lately, however, this choice has been complicated by the fact that many insurers explicitly refuse...

Finding Religion. "What does it look like, this think tank of yours?" I hesitate, aware that my fellow students at Union Theological Seminary in New York City are completing their field education placements in inner-city churches, in hospices and NICUs,...

When Dolly, the cloned sheep, made her spectacular appearance four years ago, newspapers and magazines featured photos of identical babies waiting only for the perfection of human cloning to gain entry into this world. Those babies will have to wait...

Last December, eleven years after the Public Health Service issued the first federal regulations addressing research misconduct, the Office of Science and Technology Policy published misconduct rules covering all research performed or sponsored by...

The results are now in from a controversial clinical trial involving the injection of cells obtained from aborted fetuses into the brains of persons suffering from Parkinsonism (NEJM 344, no. 10 (2001): 710-14). Of the forty subjects, twenty had received...

Goodbye to All That: The End of Moderate Protectionism in Human Subjects Research

Federal policies on human subjects research have undergone a progressive transformation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, federal policies largely relied on the discretion of investigators to decide when and how to conduct research. This...

How do we know what is right, or before that, how do we recognize what is morally salient? Such matters lie deeper than can be plumbed by traditional philosophical modes of inquiry alone. Careful study of them requires also the study of literature,...

New Era(s) in Human Subjects Research Jonathan Moreno, Jeffrey Kahn, and Anna Mastroianni offer radically divergent views of the evolution of human research ethics. In Moreno's view, the history of man research is marked by the construction of ever...

A twenty-seven-year-old African American female named YP arrives in the emergency department of a large teaching hospital at midnight. She has sickle cell anemia and is in the midst of a sickle cell crisis. She has severe pain in her thighs, arms,...

Reading between the Lines: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Genetic Testing

A case study in the kinds of problems to expect from this increasingly popular marketing tactic, On a recent Friday evening, we had the good fortune to find ourselves at a performance of Margaret Edson's Tony Award-winning play W;t (pronounced "wit")....

Swinging on the Pendulum: Shifting Views of Justice in Human Subjects Research

Federal policies on human subjects research have performed a near-about face. In the 1970s, policies were motivated chiefly by a belief that subjects needed protection from the harms and risks of research. Now the driving concern is that patients,...

The effort to revise the Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS Guidelines has sparked a sometimes vitriolic debate centering on the use of placebo controls. Two seemingly overlapping but conceptually distinct disputes are currently raging in the...

Fifteen years ago I wrote in the Bulletin of Medical Ethics of "American bioethical imperialism." I was annoyed by the attempt of a group of American bioethicists to set up a European Center of Bioethics, without reference to the many Europeans already...

What?" they said. "Another magazine? There are already too many!" That was a common reaction in 1971 to the idea of launching a Hastings Center journal. The skepticism was not because of the many journals in biomedical ethics--there were none at the...